A short post on coping with depression: the “happy hour”
I posted this on my threads last night and someone asked, “Sometimes with depression it’s hard to find joy... how did you do it?”
Valid. This is the hard part—actually finding or feeling the joy. Depression plays tricks on us: it tells us we don’t deserve joy or that if we feel it, the sadness we feel will suddenly be invalidated or erased, as if it never happened. That can feel like a further dismissal or minimization of an experience that for many of us, already feels dismissed or minimized.
“If I actually feel joy, will that prove everyone who says ‘just snap out of it’ right?”
“If I feel happy in this moment, will the people who I told about my sadness too think I made it all up?”
“If something finally feels good, will it all just crash again? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay here instead?”
People who love you want you to thrive.
If someone only shows up for you when you’re in pain, chances are that’s a relationship you need to re-evaluate.
If someone chooses to see your joy as a sign that your sorrow wasn’t real, they have some serious work to do to understand mental health.
And yes, it might get bad again. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve joy or happiness in the meantime. You do. There is no need to earn it.
Here is how I find joy when my depression tells me I don’t deserve it, can’t feel it, or that it’s unsafe to:
I think about how four-year-old Rachel would approach the happy hour. Would she want to go to a park? Get a treat? Read a book?
I imagine how she would respond to a flower or a butterfly. Or to music in the car. And then I remind myself that is who I am—that is the version of me that’s most true, and that’s the version of me I put on when the hour starts.
This isn’t a blanket cure or treatment, it’s a tool: one I’m adding to my toolbox and one I hope might help someone else who is grasping.
Let me know if this was helpful in the comments, and I’ll share more tips like this as I navigate this season.